The light at the bottom of the gallows.

Against the backdrop of recommendation by a New Jersey legislative commission that the State abolish the death penalty because it does not serve "a legitimate purpose" and "is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency," the U.S. government appears to be spinning the story that it bowed to the wishes of the sovereign nation of Iraq as to the timing of Saddam’s execution. Not turning Saddam over "would have involved riding roughshod over the Iraqi leaders’ insistence on their sovereignty in the execution," says an unnamed source in the New York Times. Balderdash – American taxpayers bought the Iraq government and are still paying for it.

It’s just a coincidence that the execution happened on the Friday evening before New Year’s weekend, 10:10 PM, Washington Time, the beginning of a non-religious holiday, when, for the next three-and-a-half days, the fewest number of people in the U.S. were reporting, reading or viewing the news. And, that the preparations for national mourning over the death of President Ford three days before were dominating what little news bandwidth there was. The White House claims that President Bush went to sleep without knowing whether the execution had been carried out, which would have been just after 9 PM Texas time, because he "knew that it was going to happen." If Iraq really is "sovereign nation," how did he "know" with such certainty?

A more likely explanation for U.S. insistence that Iraq is operating independently is that the Bush administration has now written off the whole affair as a bad investment, and wants to be in a position to wash it hands of it before the President’s term expires. The more opportunities Washington can give the Iraqi government to screw up before then, the easier it will be for Bush to blame the failure on them. Here is how the administration is using the New York Times to weave this theme:

For the past three years, the United States has attempted to lay the foundations in Iraq for a civil society and a nation under law. American officials say privately that the Maliki government, by allowing the Hussein execution to be conducted as it did, signaled more powerfully than ever before that it was unwilling or incapable of surmounting the deep sectarian divisions here.

Expect to hear "We gave them a great shot, and they blew it" repeated many times before the last American flies on the last flight out of Baghdad. Nobody in the current administration fought in Vietnam, but they surely remember the mockery of the "light at the end of the tunnel" promises when that last helicopter lifted away from the American embassy in Saigon, and they want to avoid it this time.